Policy —

Piracy: all it takes is a garage

The MPAA administers a worldwide smackdown to suspected movie pirates. But the …

Piracy—it's not just for the high seas anymore. In fact, according to the MPAA, 44 percent of their piracy losses in the US come from college students. This claim can only be made with a straight face, of course, if you believe that college students would otherwise be purchasing retail copies of every film that they download (we've discussed the problems with these numbers before).

Fortunately, the MPAA and its sibling, the RIAA, also pursue real pirates, and their actions are increasingly international. The motion picture industry, for instance, has just filed civil suits against two pirate outlets in Beijing's central business district. Though it can be more difficult to enforce intellectual property rights in China than in the US or Europe, the movie industry has a fairly good track record. In 2002-2003 (the last year for which they provide numbers), the industry filed 10 civil cases against commercial piracy operations in China, and it won all 10.

Two weeks ago in Fiji, police there raided a shop in Suva that was allegedly selling pirated DVDs and have stepped up enforcement efforts against suspected copyright violators.

And here in the US, police in Brooklyn just announced a raid on a large-scale CD and DVD copying business that will, apparently, be "a significant blow to the nation's piracy market." This claim needs to be taken with a grain of salt—this was a business operated from a garage, after all, and the only person arrested was a 19-year-old named Abdouraitamance Diallo. If owning 23 duplicator towers and a garage is all that it takes to become a major piracy operation, then the bar isn't set real high.

Police did seize more than 40,000 discs, including copies of "Snakes on a Plane." What—you thought that pirates only copied movies people want to watch?

Image courtesy NATO

The industry estimates that more than 90 percent of these bootlegs come from camcorder sources, which explains the movie business's continued crackdown on taping in the theater. The National Association of Theatre Owners even has a bounty program for theatre employees who catch or turn in the tapers.

Because it's impossible to say how many commercial piracy operations exist, it can be hard to know if progress against them is being made. The MPAA points out that its enforcement efforts are increasingly successful. 81 million optical discs were seized in 2005, an 8 percent jump from the previous year They also seized 30,000 illicit burners in 2005, up 113 percent from 2004. These numbers can be used to tell two stories. In the first story, pirates are being shut down, investigations are growing more fruitful, and, generally speaking, everything is getting better and better in every possible way.

On the other hand, the large year-to-year increases in seizures of burning equipment and discs could just as easily indicate that the piracy business is booming. Knowing how many units of anything were seized only tells us something interesting when we know what percentage this is of the whole. Without knowing that, it's difficult to say whether enforcement actions are now less, more, or just as effective as they were five years ago.

A final point to consider: piracy has moved online. By the MPAA's own stab-in-the-dark estimate, one third of all piracy in the US is done via the Internet, and this number could well grow in the coming years. If that's the case, it means that raids against DVD-stamping operations will become less important over time, and trumpeting the latest seizure of "x number of discs" will be less significant than shutting down file-swapping services.